I really doubt, that this fesature will ever be usable in real time! It reminds me of the brushes, that are still kind of sluggish at times, sometimes they are ok. That has been like that since LR 1 for me, switching to an iMac i7 with 12 GB of RAM didn't take care of the problem either.

My family photo library consists of 15000 images and for days the facial recognition progress bar hangs at around 1/3rd with my machine plowing on with an average 130% CPU load. And who programmed this feature? I have now verified ober 1000 photos of my daughter at all age levels and LR is still suggesting almost any face it can find in my photos as "is this your daughter"? I mean, how pathetic can you get having over 1000 pictures of my daughter to analyse the face and still not getting it right?

Adobe, I think it would be faster to manually go through all the 15000 pics and use the spray brush to tag the faces myself. Reminds me of the map disaster that Apple faced, when introducing it first. This feature is just not ready and in Alpha stage! But without it, LR6 would be missing a key feature to justify the upgrade price. I guess that is why they put it in anyway.

knipsefritze I totally agree. The facial recognition is a joke and I'm surprised so many seem to be taking it so well. I only upgraded to LR5 a few months back, and later discovered LR6 with face recognition was about to be released. Adobe weren't prepared to offer me a complementary or reduced cost upgrade, so I bit the bullet and paid for another upgrade as I really wanted face recognition. Now I feel completely duped with this practically useless feature.

Yeah, the brushes too. I have an Intuos tablet and I need to move the pen REALLY slowly in order for the brush action to follow me. I mean REALLY slowly. Speed increase? It's slower than ever. And I do this for a living, so it is of more than passing interest.

Still the same problem, It took also 2 days and notice that it miss close to 50% of the faces. I have notice that when I started to check individual picture. Many of the ppl where not even selected even there where a perfect head shot.

Hope in the next release they will fix the speed issue and the quality of the selection.

I'm amazed how few threads exist about how bad this feature is. I'm thinking of starting one about best practices because at this point I've become somewhat of an expert and have developed some workarounds.

But the fact remains that face recognition is the only new thing to justify renumbering the version and would be the only reason to buy an upgrade, if it worked. Since it doesn't, people are better off staying in LR 5.X.

I let my machine run over night and it is crunching numbers for Lightroom's face detection now for 15 hours straight. Still about 20% left to go as far as the progress bar is concerned. So I guess for 15000 photos, LR needs about close to 20 hours to go through them all. That calculates to roughly 5 seconds per image! So that is a rough number to calculate the time needed to get the face detection done. LR is unusable while that is running.

LR is running over 50 threads on my machine, uses 130-200 % proceessing power at a constant rate, leaving two cores at idle, is sluggish as can be and shows the beach ball for almost 5 seconds after every click I try to do. Very, very frustrating for a pro App! I am not a programmer, but I thought multiple cores and multithreading would let a machine do multiple tasks at once without completely blocking the program?

liquid cooled Fx-8350, 16gb ram. Library is on an average SSD, but images on quite an old drive.

The thing is, its not like it is even thrashing the CPUs or HD. Its just plain slow. Like it is crippled.

And I had one crash after finding about 600 faces in an unknown number of photos that even managed to unmount the drive where the library resided.

Other than that, it does stay usable during, which is a plus. Definitely designed with some multi-tasking in mind, compared to the performance of previous versions. I just wish it were a bit more dynamic in its allocation of resources.

Edit:

Definitely using all 8 cores. LR is only using between 18 and 24 % of the CPU, and only 1.9gb of RAM, at the moment, while detecting.

It's like it was written by high school kids. No separation of GUI and worker threads, no proper status on each face so that you can click ahead and feel safe that you are not doing random stuff. Terrible use of the system yet the ability, no matter how low you set the thread priority, to cripple the mouse. All in all, probably the worst implementation in any of the many modern and very expensive applications I use. That team should feel ashamed.

Note: 8 core 8150, separate striped cache and scratch disks, large and fast image disk. 24GB RAM. SSD boot drive. About 120k images in the folders. Can't leave it running as it bogs down. May have to give up on tagging as I don't have the time to baby sit this piece of junk.

Also, LR 6 was running very unstable and crashed quite often while having the use of the graphic card enabled. Once I turned that off in the prefs, LR was running stable again. Not a very good implementation of that feature either!

I think you kinda nailed it regarding the coding practice... it's astonishing. I get the roots of the application (older architecture) but there have been years that have passed without any significant REAL improvement. It's inexplicable why so many of the core routines (not just Facial Recognition) use 1 or 2 of my available 5820k/4GZ/16GB/SSD Boot/Raid0 system. (Facial recognition only being the latest). I'm not sure if this app is just so nitch (no one using?) or just lack of focus on the team or whatever. I work on development of large scale applications for a large enterprise with thousands of applications in our portfolio. Where i work this would be grounds for team swap.

No separation of GUI and worker threads, no proper status on each face so that you can click ahead and feel safe that you are not doing random stuff.

I think this is the key problem I am concerned about. I can't imagine any programmer worth their salt linking the GUI to the worker threads the way LR 6 seems to. I can't say how many times I've clicked on something and then LR has registered my click later and done something opposite of what I want. The current implementation is abysmally slow and buggy, and I can't believe they released it like this. Did they not test it on a catalog with 10s of thousands of photos? I'm really disappointed with this feature, which I was greatly anticipating before I actually tried to use it. I've been a LR customer since version 1, and this is by far the worst release!

Just adding my voice to this post as I am experiencing the same issue that it cannot be switched off or paused. Lightroom carries on! This is ridiculous!

I love the facial recognition idea and I work with individual catalogues per shoot, so I can decide which catalogue to index and which not, but Lightroom forces you to have it on every single catalogue.

I agree with everyone here. This feature is a great idea but no way is it ready for launch. The biggest issue is that even when you get through all the wrong identifications you find it missed half the faces. Even ones that are so plainly obvious are missed.

Anyone upgrading from LR5 will be horribly disappointed.

I really hope they will release a better version as this one is a shambles.

Just want to add a +1 to LR being excruciatingly slow. I came from Picasa because I had heard alot of great things about LR, and just looking through LR it seems functionally more mature than Picasa, but good god, I am not going to wait 5 to 10 seconds between clicks just for some extra functionality.

First off, I agree with everyone here so far in that the kind of performance we see in this product is appalling. This is a professional product from a company that should be familiar with its users. This is not a computer problem that is too hard to fix, as others (Picasa for example) have solved many years ago.

I have about 60,000 photos in my library. It took my Macbook Pro (Core i7, 2.3 Ghz) a full day and a half to find and index all the faces. It started out pretty fast but once the number of named faces reached about 1000, it slowed to a crawl. at about 5000 faces, it was no longer useable.

My take on why the UI slows down is because it is just the UI that is slow, not the worker threads (if there are any). Lightroom seems to update the suggested name of every single photo in your library at every click, including (somehow) those not displayed on the screen. Therein lies the problem and also a workaround.

A Workaround:

I discovered the following by accident when I worked with faces form the "Previous Import" smart collection.

In your folders view, select only a few folders to limit the number of displayed photos to several thousand. Now I am not sure how reasonable this is for everyone who uses Lightroom face recognition (eg, some shoots may include more than several thousand photos), but...

THIS DOES WORKfor me. The UI becomes lightening fast when renaming photos. I would be interested in knowing if this helps anyone else.

+1 - I have exactly the same problem. PC with a very good spec (i7, 16GB RAM, SSD). Performance when tagging people (answering to the proposition: yes /no) is extremely slow. CPU is utilized at 10% maybe. Disk usage is at 2%. Not sure what's wrong, but seems like some crappy issue in Lightroom app. Looking forward for resolution - Picasa was way more better & responsive in this area.

I have a 65k photo catalog and found some of the same performance issues described here with performing operations on large sets of photos. Confirming takes many minutes to re-search for "similar" photos in the People Viewer and large selections make the browser less than responsive.

I found that the experience was MUCH better if I constrained my working set to 1000 photos or fewer by choosing a subset of my files in the Library module before entering the "People" view. When I increased that to 5000 photos, it was almost manageable as long as I didn't try to "confirm" too many photos at once. I'm just going to work 1000 photos at a time. I am sure that this number will vary depending on system performance. Here is mine for reference (a roughly 5 year old, but highly spec'd PC at the time):

Intel Core i7-2600k - 3.4GHz

16 GB Ram

Catalog on SSD, photos on regular spinning disk

I am an Adobe employee, but I don't work on Lightroom so please don't consider this an "official" response.

I'm also seeing major performance issues in the people view. removing or confirming a face region which results in a not responding state.

Watching the system performance I see 18% CPU use and very high disk uses.

Seems like the performance issues are mostly related to a lack if optimization or lack of GPGPU processing resulting in higher CPU use and disk related performance issues. (I'm planning on doing some additional SSD drive tests)

I have followed the recent performance recommendation to drastically increase the camera raw cache I've set my cache to 100GB

Debating what an appropriate preview cache size is. Since I'm hearing a lot that larger is better I'm following that logic.I'm raising my preview cache size from 100Gb to 250Gb. Here is how I determined my new starting point.

Facial recognition is of course a useful tool for many individuals however its inclusion into Lightroom, which (for me) primarily software to process and render large volumes of RAW image files from Digital Cameras, has created issues that slow down the processes in Lightroom. The program has become bloated and there are some features like this one should be removed to ensure that the core functions function as they should.

The simplest way to deal with the slowness of Facial Recognition is to avoid working in the "all images" or other folders/collections that have more than 5000 images. With my catalog of 70,000 images it's a nightmare trying to work with Facial Recognition. If I stick to small image groups (working year by year, or project by project) it's reasonably fast and functional.

IMO the majority of performance issues are all in I/O with the disks, rather than read/write speed it's in the simultaneous access of many files all reading information. It get's expensive to deal with limits on input/output operations can be performed per-second (IOPS)....(Multidisk Arrays – More disks in the array mean greater IOPS.)

1. The facial recog part of the software is 'okay'ish' It kind of does what it says on the can..just about.

Thats where the praise ends..!!

2. Painfully slow, tedious and downright awful..

I've got dual mirrored 12TB Thunderbolt storage, I/O's are not the issue, its bad coding. My storage remains lightning fast despite Lightroom doing its stuff, in fact I was able to run several backups without LR noticing that anything was happening.

3. Saves or lack thereof..

If you feel you must use this feature, do not commit too much effort into it. I spent the better part of 12 hrs over 2 days sorting, arranging, identifying, correcting, only for LR to lose at least 5000 named people out of 7500.

Thank christ I do wildlife mostly. 65k images processed with approx 7500 faces (or objects that LR 'thinks' is a face) to lose 5000 or so was a bitter pill I do not ever want to repeat.

I'll be exporting my 'faces' to Apple Photos because that at least remembers faces !! the workflow sucks but for faces it works.

The fact there has been do formal response to this issue speaks volumes to me. If Lightroom/Photoshop wasnt so key in my workflow I wouldn't be using it ay all.

Not only do we have to be lied about security issues, we get the hard sell at the end of each year of subs.

I am amazed how poor the Lightroom facial recognition works relative to the Picasa facial recognition. This issue is even more troubling in that it is now 2017 and the Lightroom facial recognition routinely identifies non face objects as faces.

I get the sense that the Lightroom developers consider face recognition a checklist feature mostly for the benefit of non-professional photographers and therefore not a core feature worthy of serious developer time.

My opinion as a non-professional pro-summer is that Lightroom really needs to address the following issues in order to retain its position over the next 10 years.

+ Speed up everything, especially when working with large catalogs. I have over 100,000 photos and working with Lightroom is tedious. It turns out that after a certain point no matter how much hardware you devote to Lightroom it only uses a fraction of the resources. I have purchased the fastest Arrays, SSD's, CPU's and goobs of the fastest memory along with top end Nvidia video cards - and I still just sit and wait for Lightroom to process my facial recognition and management tasks. It is embarrassing in 2017. I can only surmise that Abobe has no real interest in Facial Recognition.

+ Make better use of top end hardware. This means enabling those users with the best hardware to take advantage of their investment. I invest in top end hardware to save time, but I don't get the sense that Abobe really sees saving my time as a market opportunity.

+ Focus on making Facial recognition fast, accurate and easy to use - the payoff will be immense - and if done well the professionals will be impressed and start to actually use Lightroom facial recognition.

IMO, this capability is not ready for use at all. It completely ignores people that are viewed from the side (profile), or wearing sunglasses. Its accuracy is completely inadequate and it continues to do very rough mistakes (mixing a guy with beard with a young girl) after getting thousands of images to learn on. In short - it is useless. It is heavily behind the industry state of the art. It can't be compared with long existing face recognition capabilities of Google or Facebook. It is a shame that so professional software company releases such poorly designed feature.